Sega Cuts "Long Overtime Hours" by 80%

While long work hours and “crunch time” have been a problem in the games industry for as long as anyone can remember, it’s only been recently that people have started to actually raise a fuss about it. While we’re still a long ways away from seeing any kind of unionization within the industry, people were quick to vilify the now-defunct Telltale Games when it was revealed how poorly they treated their employees. People have pooped on Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford when he tried to defend the necessity of crunch time. And just yesterday, the reveal of “100 hour work weeks” for Red Dead Redemption 2, which was supposed to inspire confidence and promote their work ethic, instead had people raising concerns about working conditions within the company.

We’re heading in a good direction, but despite all that, no studio had really any good news regarding any kind of progress or solution. No studio, that is, until now, because Sega just announced, via a new financial report, that it has managed to eliminate 80 percent of “long overtime hours”.

Granted, this has been in the works for a while. Sega really started the anti-crunch initiative back in 2013, but it’s starting to really pay dividends now, and frankly, the timing of this announcement couldn’t be better.

“The main focus of the Group’s work-style reforms is the achievement of a balance between work and private life. We want employees to have quality time outside of the office so that they do not lose their creative drive. Well-established measures that the Group has introduced to reduce long overtime work have produced tangible results.”

Of course, this is a Japanese company, so what they consider “long overtime hours” and what we in the west would consider unreasonable are still a pretty wide gap. You could work 79 hours a week and it would be considered “normal” overtime. But it’s still a step in the right direction, and I’ll celebrate whatever progress we can make.